“Madelena López de Victoria, you are the bride of my flesh, sanctified by dream. Our union is blessed under the Old Ways.” If there was ever a time to invoke the Old Ways, this was it. He was speaking the parts of the union oaths that he remembered. It steadied him, and he hoped it would reassure her. “Do you accept me as your Only One?”
She was all eyes now, and he could see the whole universe in their bottomless black depths, stars in the glittering reflections of the bank of lights over them. Never had she been so beautiful to him. A slow blink from her said Yes.
“Then walk with me into a new life.” He slid one arm under her back and lifted her up. With the other hand he cradled the back of her head. She was trembling. With a few slow kisses he mapped her jugular, choosing the best point of entry. They’d wiped her skin down with something bitter. Feeling more like a monster than he ever had in his life, he broke her flesh.
It hurt her. She cried out, voice sharp with pain, and went rigid in his arms. If they’d been in a frenzy of passion, that pain would have enflamed her, but now she had to take it straight, and know what it was like to hang in a predator’s mouth. He caressed the back of her head with his fingers as he sucked, but knew it would be of little comfort. Her blood should have leapt into his mouth, but he had to pull at it hard from the beginning. This made the taking all the more brutal.
Ah, but she was still Madelena, and her blood was sweet beyond imagining, each swallow quenching a thirst he’d carried for weeks. And this time, instead of stale bruise blood, he was drinking her heart’s blood, and it was singing him the story of her life. When he fed on other people, he blocked these stories, but for her, he opened up, and let her memories, her thoughts, her dreams flow into him on the long tide of her blood.
In the background he was aware of Felix and his team reading off numbers, Maddy’s blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen levels, temperature. These numbers were absurd, weak abstractions compared to what was running through him. Her life, all that made her unique, all that added up to Maddy. He heard her sister practicing violin, an awful noise. He tasted her first swig of beer. He saw her abuelita carrying a pink birthday cake. Thirsty, bottomless, he drank it all in. Through it all ran the story of her heart. Her first memories were of being in the hospital. Her earliest sensations were of pain.
These will not be your last memories, Madelena.
Maddy expected it would be primal, physical, a blood sacrifice, and it was, but it was more. He was eating her memories, sucking up everything she was, and reflecting it back to her with love. He loved her memories, he loved her. He was in her, speaking to her, mind to mind, even as he inscribed his words on her flesh. You are mine, I am yours.
After a while, it didn’t even hurt. She hung like a rag doll in his arms, unable to so much as lift a hand, but her mind—her mind was on fire, roiling with images, memories long forgotten.
Gregor shifted her weight in his arms, and made a fresh bite. By that time she was too far gone to feel it as anything other than pressure. She was deflating, getting smaller and smaller, until there wasn’t much left to give him—of anything.
“Stay with me, Maddy.”
But the memories stopped flowing because something else was tugging at her. The bright light was back, pulsing and spinning, not white, but all colors. God’s kaleidoscope. She stood in its glare, her hand up to her eyes. It invited her in. It was tempting, so tempting that she began to drift toward it, but she didn’t go far, because Gregor, her ball and chain, tethered her. She remembered what she was supposed to do.
“Later is good for me,” she told the light.
And then there was a commotion on the outside, lots of noise. People getting all worked up over her body, as if it mattered.
Then there was silence, and she was floating in a black void. No, not floating, being carried. A golden crucifix spun and flashed in front of her eyes.
Save and Protect.
And then she met Alex. His blood ran through her like springtime, waking her up and calling her out to play. Then came Mikhail, stalking into her slowly, strong and purposeful. His blood began to rebuild her from the ground up. And then there was Gregor, a line of fire coursing her veins, igniting her.
Gregor! She was thirsty for him, thirsty like she’d never been, she could not get enough. He opened to her, his memories started to flood in, and she embraced them, but it didn’t last long, not nearly long enough.
They cut him off, took him away, and she met his father. She remembered him from when they all had crowded around her, an angular, white haired man with icy blue eyes. Ivan Mikhailovich Faustin. She had the strangest sensation that he was too big to be inside her. Instead she sank into him, and it was like swimming in the ocean on a moonless night. The last thing she remembered was a whisper of Mrs. Faustin. A cool touch and a prayer.
Chapter 11
One month later
Opening night of Elixir
Gregor was doing his best to ditch the interviewer from Vanity Fair, but having little success. The guy was a human lamprey, hanging on him as Gregor worked the crowd, shaking hands and spreading euro-kisses around. They’d wanted to write a home lifestyle piece, until Gregor made it clear he had no home lifestyle. One glance at the two rooms in the back of Tangiers settled that question, and they decided to do a fashion shoot instead, which meant stuffing him in an Alexander McQueen suit and piling models slathered in white makeup at his feet. The piece was going to be called “The Vampire King of New York”. It was so easy to hide in plain sight. Some critics complained that vampire motif was passé, but Gregor knew that he’d laugh his way to the bank.
That shoot was appalling, but a small price to pay to keep them out of his personal life and away from Maddy.
It was true he had no home of his own yet, but he and Maddy had a temporary one at Alex’s place in Tribeca. Alex put great stock in amenities like throw pillows and area rugs, so it was the perfect place for Maddy to convalesce—safe, comfortable, and respectable enough for her family to visit. Which they invariably did first thing in the evening, before he’d even managed to make coffee. In the meantime, Alex lived at Tangiers, which he enjoyed all too much.
Gregor had a hard time hiding the smile that crept across his face whenever he thought about Maddy. He pictured her curled up on Alex’s couch in her pink velour sweat suit and fuzzy slippers, wan and brave. The last month had not been easy. The first week of her transition was terrifying for him and painful for her, but she never complained. Lately she was well enough to be restless, and of course she wanted to come tonight, so she was going to make a brief appearance. He hoped she wouldn’t overexert herself. Honey had volunteered to “style” her for the evening, which he supposed meant she would help her find something to wear to hide the battery belt.
“Gregor!” A Very Famous Personage, drunk as usual, flailed her way up to him and grabbed his arm. “You have to tell me the truth, the absolute truth. Are vampires real?”
“Of course, darling. Why would I create a club for them if they didn’t exist?”
“But where are they? I don’t see them.” She gestured at the crowd around them, dismissing five vamps without knowing it. “Introduce me!”
Inspired, he leaned forward and whispered a confidence in her ear. She turned to the Vanity Fair guy, amazed, and shocked into silence at the sight of her first vampire. The Vanity Fair guy, knowing only that he had her attention, turned on the charm. It was a match made in heaven.